The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street Read online

  “Ha!” Charlie pounded his fist down on the bar. “I’ll be damned! I stop there all the time. I get chocolate with chocolate jimmies. Or the Yankee Doodle Parfait. My wife, she loves your butter pecan. At least twice a month, we go. You’ve got a place over in Edison, right?”

  I nodded. “A Greek couple owns that one. The Papadakises.”

  “Zaftig, good-looking broad? And the husband with the mustache?”

  “I guess,” I said vaguely.

  My father stared at me, astounded.

  “Malka,” he declared.

  The man called “Pickles” pounded him on the shoulder. “Your little girl here is rich, Bailey! Did you know that?”

  “Please,” I said. “Hardly.”

  “Did you see her billboard?” Charlie said excitedly. “Your kid’s got a billboard. Right out there on the highway.”

  “I did,” Papa said proudly. “The Statue of Liberty no less.”

  “I’d say this calls for a celebration,” said Irving. “Next round’s on you, Bailey. Drinks for everyone.”

  There were six of us at the bar, plus Julius. Papa ordered a round for all of us, then gave my shoulder a little squeeze.

  “You weren’t kidding back there when you told Milton you could pay double.” He pressed his palm to my cheek. “Kindeleh,” he marveled. “Look at you. This really is bashert. Really, Malka. You and I? Meeting like this? What are the chances? Dunkle’s Ice Cream.” He shook his head and exhaled.

  “To my daughter!” He raised his highball.

  “To your daughter!” the men chorused. We drank one round, then another. They toasted me again. “To Lillian! To ice cream!”

  When I tugged at Papa’s sleeve and reminded him that Bert was indeed waiting, the men insisted on drinking a toast to him as well. “To Captain Albert Dunkle!” they cheered. “To crushing the Japs and the Hun!” Clinking their glasses, they smiled at me. Quite frankly, I had never had so much male attention—or quite so many drinks in such rapid succession—before. The inside of the restaurant took on a wavering quality, like a dry riverbed rippling in the heat.

  A waitress appeared clutching menus. Suddenly we were all moving to a table by the window and Papa was gallantly pulling out a padded red chair for me. The sky was awash with melancholy pink and violet, and a lone streetlight near the railroad station came on dimly. The other men ordered tongue sandwiches or plates of meat loaf, but Papa insisted that he and I have a proper steak dinner on account of it being my birthday.

  “But I planned to eat dinner with my husband,” I slurred. Suddenly I was having trouble feeling my teeth.

  “So you’ll eat a second one later, when you arrive,” Papa said magnanimously. Signaling for the waitress, he ordered fruit cups for us both, followed by the sirloin special with mashed potatoes and peas. Plus another round of bourbons for everyone.

  “Malka,” he kept saying adoringly, shaking his head. “All grown up.”

  My insides, they were blooming. Yet it was hard to make the cognitive leap between the restless, red-haired man in the dark coat who had sat beside me on the floor of the Hilfsverein’s detention center so many years ago in Hamburg and the assured, glinty old man seated beside me now, entertaining the table with stories about a friend who was building a grand hotel out in the desert of Nevada. Papa spoke with great gusto and humor, re-creating the dialogue theatrically. The more elaborate he got, the more the men hooted and applauded. My father, I realized proudly. He was beloved. Still. He was the star of the entire restaurant.

  “I’m telling you fellas, the potential is huge. A pleasure resort like no one has ever seen. Malka.” He turned to me. “Your husband is going to want to get in on this, too.”

  Watching him, it occurred to me that we had become exactly what we had dreamed of all those years ago, Papa and I. We were like the actors in the moving pictures. In the first scene, we had been Malka and Herschel Bialystoker, two poor, ratty Russians speaking Yiddish, arriving on the Lower East Side in the stinking heat. Yet now here we were, transformed into Lillian Dunkle and Hank Bailey, two scrubbed, enterprising Americans dressed in clean, department-store clothing, driving in a DeSoto across the farmlands of New Jersey with a pocketbook full of money. We were as malleable as actors, my father and I. We could be anybody.

  Papa signaled the waitress again. A pretty brunette with an overbite.

  “Hey, gorgeous, I’m just curious.” He leaned back in his chair. “What’s your name? Tell me it’s Betty. Or Lana. Tell me you weren’t named after a movie star.”

  “Uh-oh.” Sid elbowed Irving beside him. “Here he goes. On your mark, get set—”

  The waitress blushed. After some cajoling she allowed that her name was Sally. Watching her, I felt the back of my neck prickle.

  “Sally. Sally,” my father said rapturously, letting the word roll off his tongue. “Sally, this is my long-lost daughter. Malk—I mean Lillian. And today is her birthday. And she is a great success. Her husband, he is a rich ice cream magnate.”

  Charlie leaned over and whispered something to Papa that made him laugh. “Okay, okay,” Papa conceded. He waved Sally off dismissively and quickly turned back to me.

  “Kindeleh, this ice cream business,” Papa said, gesturing with his glass. “How much does your husband share with you about it? Because, you see, I know some very interested parties who might be very partial to opening some Dunkle’s franchises themselves. In fact, some of them”—he gestured expansively around him—“might even be seated right here at this table.”

  I had not expected to be asked for a sales pitch. Yet I heard myself saying, “Why, I know everything, Papa.”

  “Well, well.” He sat back. “You don’t say.”

  “Bert and I, we built Dunkle’s together. From scratch. Most of it was my idea.”

  “You hear that, fellas?” Papa boomed. “From scratch.”

  The men leaned in attentively. I found myself telling them about all the innovations Bert and I had come up with, the ice cream machine and our special patented formula. I explained to them our franchise model. I even estimated our gross, net, and overhead—which I did not usually do. My own candor surprised me. Yet the liquor had made me expansive, and this was my father, after all. My urge to please him was suddenly overwhelming. The way he gazed at me, encouragingly, with rapt admiration, it felt like stars raining down. Champagne uncorking.

  “So those are the nuts and bolts of it,” I said finally, feeling flushed with the effort. “Are you really interested in all this?”

  “Are you kidding?” Irving said, more to Papa than to me. “Out there in the desert? With that heat? It’s genius. And who doesn’t love ice cream? Meyer himself, I’ve seen that guy polish off a quart of fudge ripple in an hour.”

  “Even gamblers gotta eat,” Sid agreed.

  “Malka.” Papa leaned forward, tenting his fingers. “If we wanted to open, say, three or four of these places out in Nevada, you think we could?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said, even though, in the back of my mind, I had the vague idea that perhaps it was actually not quite so simple. Different states had different laws regarding shipping and agriculture, after all, and I knew of no dairies in the area.

  Suddenly I was sopping up the last of my gravy with a dinner roll. I’d had no idea how hungry I’d been. Outside, it had grown dark. The bright reflections from inside the dining room shone against the plate-glass window, mirroring images of what was transpiring inside. The whole world seemed to be contained within the blazing, curtained box of Rickie’s Round-Up. I had the terrible feeling that there was something urgent I was supposed to be attending to, yet anytime I tried to concentrate, my thoughts became like fistfuls of confetti tossed into the wind. I was cognizant only of this: I was advancing our business!

  Sally arrived bearing plates of apple pie à la mode. Mine had a little candle in it for my birthday. As Papa, his friends, and Sally all sang to me, I heard myself laughing with pleasure.

  “Hap
py birthday, kindeleh.” Across the table Papa squeezed my hand. I was so caught off guard—I felt so giddy—that I neglected to make a wish or to ask the waitress if the ice cream was homemade, as was my custom. Indeed, I had trouble feeling the vanilla sliding onto my tongue when I finally took a bite.

  Papa shoveled a great forkful of pie into his mouth, his pinkie ring glinting. He took another sip of his drink. “To getting rich in America with my long-lost daughter,” he saluted. “To ice cream in Las Vegas.”

  “Here, here,” the men toasted.

  I laughed, raising my glass. “To gold rings on everyone’s fingers!” I cried, gesturing toward Papa’s hand.

  Pickles teased, “Since when did you start wearing jewelry, Hank?”

  Papa glanced down. “Ah, that’s just Enid’s.”

  “Who’s Enid?” I said.

  “His second wife,” Charlie brayed. “May she rest in peace. Or was she your third, Hank? I can never keep up.”

  “Bridget. I thought Bridget was his third.” Irving made an hourglass shape in the air with his hands.

  “No. Bridget was the common-law gal,” said Charlie.

  “Wait. So who’s the one he’s with now? Whatsername?”

  I sat back heavily in my chair. Papa continued eating as if nothing were amiss. “Josie,” he said, chewing.

  I picked up my spoon and threw it on the floor. All the men looked at me.

  “You’ve had three other wives?” Suddenly I felt sick.

  The restaurant grew quiet. Other diners were eating now. They glanced over at us.

  “Malka.” Papa glared at me. “We’re just kibitzing. Just making conversation.”

  “You think this is a joke?”

  “I thought we were having a good time here. Finish your pie.”

  “My pie? MY PIE?”

  “You know, fellas, I think I’m going to head over to the bar,” Sid announced, standing. “Me, too,” said the others, nearly in unison. In a flurry they rose, taking their drinks. Papa and I, we were abandoned at the table.

  “Well, thanks a helluva lot. Now you’ve embarrassed me,” Papa hissed.

  Suddenly, there were two of him before me, blurring around the edges. I tried to fuse the double images back into one. “You mamzer.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You men.”

  “Christ. Listen to you.” Papa gestured. “You really are exactly like your mother.”

  His words were a slap. “I am not!” I shouted, struggling to stand. I swayed like a metronome. A glass of water spilled, drenching the tablecloth. Papa’s friends at the bar glanced over at us. Sid, I noticed, was pulling his coat on.

  “Sit down, would you?” Papa whispered furiously. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”

  He yanked me back down into my chair.

  “If we’re going to go into business together, you had better learn to hold your liquor,” he said in a low voice. “An ugly woman only makes an uglier drunk.”

  I put my face in my hands. My lovely birthday pie sat only half-eaten on my plate, the ice cream melting and pooling around it. The little candle nub had somehow rolled onto the floor. Though I hated myself for it, I started to cry.

  “Ach.” My father stood up again, then sat back down in his own chair and raked his hands through his hair. “I’m sorry, okay?” he said finally, in a voice that did not sound very sorry at all. “I didn’t mean it. You’re not ugly.”

  I sniffled and swallowed, even as the restaurant seemed to rotate around me. “Papa,” I rasped, taking a deep breath, “please? Tell me something. Tell me just one, single, solitary goddamn thing.”

  He glanced around uncomfortably. “The truth is, all right, I’m very impressed with you, Malka. You’ve grown up into quite a dame. You really have. You’ve got moxie. You’ve got money—”

  “Papa—” My voice caught like a bone in my throat. “Why? Please tell me. Why are men unfaithful?” This was not the question I had intended—indeed, there were a thousand more I had longed to ask him for years—yet there it was. The one that came out.

  Papa sat back, his chest rising and falling, regarding me.

  “Papa, I know that I’ve never been pretty. And I have this horrible leg.” Suddenly I began to weep all over again. I was humiliating myself, I knew, yet I could not stop. “Bert—he seems to love me anyway. But sometimes? And especially now, since he’s with the military, he’s in a different port all the time, and I don’t hear from him for months— Why, Papa? Why do men always need a Violet and a Doris and a Frieda?”

  My father shook his head and glanced bleakly around the restaurant. “I don’t know why, kindeleh.” He sighed. He sounded as if the question made him weary. “Why do your stores offer twelve different flavors of ice cream?”

  For a while I just sat across from him with my head bowed, sobbing quietly into my napkin. I felt so ashamed.

  “This husband of yours.” Papa massaged the bridge of his nose. “He’s in Delaware?”

  Blowing my nose into my napkin, I nodded. “He’s leaving in the morning. For an undisclosed location.”

  “Well then.” Papa stood up unsteadily. “We should hit the road.” He pointed to the ladies’ room. “Go take a powder. He’ll appreciate it if you look nice.”

  He signaled to the waitress for the bill. As I made my way toward the back of the restaurant, I heard the ding of the cash register and Papa smirking to Julius. “Women. It’s always an opera with them.”

  The floor of the ladies’ room pitched and rolled like a ship. I had never been this drunk before. It was a struggle for me to unpeel my panty girdle. Studying myself in the mirror, I was astounded by how disheveled I looked. I was in need of my comb, my compact of powder and rouge. My Rose Red lipstick. Fumbling around, I realized I had left my pocketbook with my scarf at the table. I swayed and belched. Papa was right. I was exactly like Mama. Hawk-faced. Shrewish. But he had kept calling me his business partner. Why, we had just agreed to become a team, he and I—here, on this very night, in Rahway, New Jersey! Together we were going to open multiple Dunkle’s franchises way out west, in this city his friends were building in Nevada. Nobody was even there yet, Papa had bragged. To grab some land—just as Bert and I had done once in Long Island—why, it would give Dunkle’s the perfect leg up over our competition after the war. Certainly it would offset the losses Bert had negotiated in his dealings with the military. I might be drunk, I said aloud to the mirror, but I was not stupid.

  And Isaac, he would finally have a grandfather. “A real character,” as Mrs. Preminger might say. Yet a bona fide relative nonetheless. It was almost too marvelous to contemplate. In an instant, the future had turned so much sweeter and richer and more peopled than I had ever imagined. I could not wait to bring Bert this great bouquet of good news.

  Bert. Oh, God. My sweet, sweet Bert. It was so late. I had yelled at him. I had been horrid. I had to go to him immediately. I glanced frantically around the tiny bathroom. Why did bathrooms never have clocks? There should be big, beautiful ones, in cast iron and gold leaf. Like they had at Penn Station and the Biltmore.

  Suddenly, I felt a wave of vertigo. If I could just sit down for a minute and catch my breath, perhaps I could get the walls to stop revolving. Stumbling back into the toilet stall, I keeled over before it and vomited. Once. Then twice. Violently. Peas and steak and pie. My entire life seemed to pour out of my throat.

  Whether I awoke minutes or hours later, I do not know. I only recall that I found myself collapsed on the yellow tile floor beside the toilet, Sally hovering over me, shaking me by the arm. “Lillian. Wake up. Your father’s waiting. Lillian. Are you okay? Are you sick?” Helping me to my feet, she wet a towel and helped me to clean myself up a bit. “Those fellas can lead a gal astray,” she said, not unkindly.

  Back inside the dining room, only the reddish stained-glass lamp above the bar remained switched on. All the chairs had been overturned and stacked on the tables. Julius was mopping the floor.
/>   “Your father went outside to warm up the car,” Sally said gently, handing me my coat and hat. “I gave him your scarf and your pocketbook.” Did I imagine it, or was Julius eyeing me with trepidation? There was no hiding it, darlings. I looked and smelled terrible—of bourbon and rose soap and bile. My own odor almost made me sick again. It was so late. I wondered if Bert would ever forgive me.

  “I think she’s too drunk to walk,” Julius said. He took one of my elbows, and Sally took the other. My back, my armpits, my forehead—everything felt sopping wet and sour-smelling, even though I also did not quite feel as if I were inhabiting my own body. I heard myself apologizing over and over—for some reason in Italian: “Mi dispiace. Mi dispiace.”

  Together they helped me into the parking lot. My head pounded furiously, my heels scraped along the pavement. Yet more than anything else, I felt ashamed.

  The parking lot was empty. “That’s queer,” Sally said.

  The night air was frigid and quiet. We kept listening and listening, looking back and forth at the deserted road in front of us. But Rahway, New Jersey, remained utterly still. Confronting us was only a vacuum of starless black. Silent houses. Dark fields. Miles of empty railroad tracks. We waited and waited for the DeSoto to materialize, but it never did.

  Papa had vanished, taking my purse.

  Chapter 11

  There are bookkeepers nowadays known as “forensic accountants.” Such a fancy-schmancy name for people who essentially sort through your trash. Old bank statements, tax records. Sales receipts. Canceled checks. The minute my lawyers recommended a firm, Isaac paid them a retainer without so much as a phone call to me. Now they have meticulously pieced together my finances like a jigsaw puzzle, and I am scheduled to go into the city to meet with them. I suspect that their prognosis will not be good. When a grand jury has already indicted you for tax evasion, chances are the IRS has some fairly damning evidence.

  My appointment is on Lexington Avenue in the new Citicorp Building. Modern, white, striated with black windows, it looks to me, from a distance, like a cartoon prison uniform. I order Hector to drive me down to the Garment District first.